The due diligence process is consuming all of my leadership team's time, and our core business performance is starting to slip. How do we run our Level 10 Meetings and manage our weekly Rocks to protect our operations from transaction fatigue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A successful exit requires you to run two parallel processes: selling the business and running the business. If your leadership team drops the ball on daily operations because they are buried in due diligence data requests, your revenue will slip, and the buyer will use that drop to re-trade the purchase price.

To prevent this, you must compartmentalize your operations. Use your Accountability Chart to divide the labor. Nominate one or two leaders, usually the Integrator and the CFO, to handle seventy percent of the transaction requests. The rest of the leadership team must remain focused on daily execution.

During your weekly Level 10 Meetings, keep the transaction discussion strictly separated from operational issues. Do not let due diligence dominate the IDS portion of the meeting. If transaction-related obstacles arise, solve them in a separate meeting.

Furthermore, reset your weekly Rocks. For the duration of the transaction window, your leadership team should have only one or two critical Rocks focused entirely on maintaining baseline performance. Anything that is not essential to keeping the business running and hitting your Scorecard targets must be postponed.

By maintaining this operational boundary, you protect your leadership team from burnout and ensure your business continues to hit its targets throughout the entire transaction.